Saturday, December 10, 2005

A Question for the Preachermans Out There

The main I never got any further than two quarters into my "seminary career" was the language requirements. Greek was an absolute mystery to me. I was lost pretty much for the get go, Hebrew, on the other hand, was a bit different. For some reason it "clicked" all of a sudden and I just "got it." I mean I could look at a verb and parse it nothing flat, the only problem was that I didn't "get it" soon enough. Hebrew is the only language that I actually felt comfortabe with. I really, really liked learning it.

I found out that I had been "removed" from seminary because my church at the time recieved a letter from the financial aide office telling them, the church, that they, the seminary fin. aide off., was returning the money my church had sent them for my education (I went to seminary for free, basically). I never got a note from any one. Oh, and the best thing was that the letter the church received was FULL of type-oh's.

But that is really neither here nor there. The reason I opened this post with that story is because even though I had a horrible time with the languages the sem made a believer out of me in regards to the validity of having a "working" knowledge of the original languages the scriptres were written in. I do believe that it is important. Now, I still remember a little Greek, I remember more Hebrew, but sometimes if I've been reading a scripture verse or hear one that strikes me as interesting I will go back and muddle my way through a bad translation from my Nestle Greek NT.

The other day, okay, last week, when I last read my Bible, I started in on 2 Corinthians. And chapter 1 verse 5 really got me thinking. It says "For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows." Now, I was an English/Education major in college (I got halfway through my student teaching and a mini-nervous breakdown-- not pretty) and because of this eduation I received I find myself often looking at language in different ways. I latched on to the phrases "flow over" and "overflows." And I began to look at them, turning the phrases this way and that. What I want to know, if any of the preachermans out there are still fluent in their Greek is how does that verse translate? Are the words for "overflow" and "flows over" the same word or different? What do they mean in the Greek. This could be a whole lot of nothing, but it seems like it could be important, too.

Could ya help a brother out?

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